Architecture and Civil Engineering: Year In Review 2011

The greening of architecture trumped starchitecture as a concern in 2011, though Steven Holl, Zaha Hadid, and Frank Gehry continued to make waves. Notable Canadian-Israeli architect Moshe Safdie and Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton brought high culture to Arkansas with the opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Architecture and Civil Engineering , For a table of Notable Civil Engineering Projects in work or completed in 2011, see below.

Architecture

In 2011 many observers pointed to a change in architecture. Architects and their clients seemed less interested in fame and publicity, and after several years of economic recession in many countries, they appeared to be exercising some restraint. Social concerns seemed on the rise. There was a lot of interest in the greening of the environment, especially in cities. New York City, for example, was in the process of creating nearly 300 ha (about 750 ac) of new parks and announced a goal of planting one million trees. In Germany, which was a leader in the environmental movement, 10 million sq m (12 million sq yd) of “green roofs” were being constructed each year. Green roofs, covered with a layer of soil and plant materials, saved energy by serving as insulation. They also cooled and freshened the outside air through evaporation and the release of oxygen.

As a result of the growing interest in architecture as environment, the three design professions—architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design—collaborated with one another more than they had in the recent past. Often they worked as equals on large projects. Some designers called themselves “landscape urbanists,” thus merging two of the disciplines. Other architects, believing that architecture should embody a strong social purpose, designed affordable housing for areas devastated by climate disasters. As one American writer put it, “Humanitarian design, in its various guises, has … become the single-most-visible architectural concern of the moment, at least among designers younger than 40.”

Another widely noticed trend of 2011, especially among younger architects, was a keen interest in digital design. A variety of computer programs offered innovative ways for designers to imagine and investigate pictorial representations of future architecture. On the technical side, there was rapidly growing use of a technology called BIM (Building Information Modeling). With BIM, all the details of a building could be recorded, coordinated, and transmitted in a database format rather than by means of traditional plans and specifications.

Awards

The Pritzker Prize, considered the world’s top honour for lifetime achievement in architecture, was presented to Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. Not widely known outside his own country, Souto de Moura was a creator of architecture that was admired for its restraint, craftsmanship, and modesty. Wrote the Pritzker jury of his work: “It is not obvious, frivolous or picturesque. It is imbued with intelligence and seriousness.” The selection of Souto de Moura, like other trends of the year, was seen as a move away from what one magazine called “the extroverted formal experimentation that has marked the most conspicuous world architecture leading up to the financial crisis of 2008.” The Stirling Prize for the best British building of the year went, for the second year in a row, to Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid. Hadid won this time for the Evelyn Grace Academy in London, described as “a highly stylized zigzag of steel and glass.” It was the first time that a school building had been chosen for the Stirling. The prestigious Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), for lifetime achievement, was awarded to Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger. In announcing the prize, RIBA president Angela Brady noted that “Herman Hertzberger has transformed the way we think about architecture, both as architects and people who use buildings…. Throughout his career his humanity has shone through in his schools, homes, theatres, and workplaces.” New York-based architect Steven Holl was the winner of the highest American honour, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), also awarded for lifetime achievement. The AIA cited two recent Holl buildings, both located in China. One was a complex in Beijing known as the Linked Hybrid, a cluster of towers containing apartments, hotels, schools, and restaurants that were linked at the 20th-floor level by a system of skywalks. The other was the Vanke Centre in Shenzhen, a so-called “horizontal skyscraper” in which low-rise apartments, hotel rooms, and offices were arranged around a hilly green garden. Holl’s best-known building in the United States was an addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., where the architect created a series of underground art galleries lit by glass boxes that pushed up through the museum’s lawn like blocks of ice. Other notable Holl works included the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and Simmons Hall, a university dormitory at MIT. The Twenty-Five Year Award, given by the AIA to a building that has proved its merit for at least a quarter century, went to the John Hancock Tower in Boston. The Hancock, a 240-m (790-ft) office tower with an all-glass surface that often mirrored the passing clouds, was considered one of the great Modernist skyscrapers. It was designed by Henry Cobb of the firm I.M. Pei & Partners and was completed in 1976. The AIA also gave its annual Honor Awards for Architecture to 10 buildings. Among the more prominent were the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, a home for ancient artifacts by Bernard Tschumi Architects; the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, by Thomas Phifer and Partners, with an interior illuminated by hundreds of elliptical skylights, which peer down like eyes; the Diana Center, an arts and community centre at Barnard College in New York, by Weiss/Manfredi; and Holl’s Vanke Centre.

Despite slowed economies around the world, major buildings continued to be completed. In Spain the City of Culture of Galicia opened in Santiago de Compostela. The project, a vast cultural complex covering 70 ha (173 ac), was the work of American architect Peter Eisenman, whose proposed design won an international competition in 1999. An archive and library were completed in 2011, with an opera house, a technology centre, and other structures yet to be finished. The buildings were shaped like a series of natural mounds faced with a rock-hard gray quartzite. They seemed to grow naturally out of the landscape. In China, Hadid designed the Guangzhou Opera House. Like many Hadid buildings, the Opera House featured free-flowing curved shapes instead of rectangular forms, and its grottolike performance space was an acoustical marvel.

In the small city of Bentonville, Ark., the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened. It was funded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton and was praised for the quality of its collection of American paintings. The museum’s architect was Moshe Safdie, who designed it as a circle of pavilions surrounding a landscaped courtyard. Safdie was also the architect of the Khalsa Heritage Centre, a new museum of Sikh culture located in Punjab, India. In Miami Beach, Fla., California-based architect Frank Gehry designed the New World Center, a music hall for the New World Symphony orchestra and a building with a spectacular multistory indoor performance space. The Center’s exterior was finished in white stucco to harmonize with the celebrated Art Deco historic district located nearby. Another Gehry design was an apartment tower in Manhattan known as New York by Gehry. At 265 m (870 ft), it was the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere. Three of its exterior walls were covered in strips of stainless steel that looked rumpled and wavy. In Lyon, France, architects Jakob + MacFarlane created an office-plus-showroom building known as the Orange Cube, a structure overlooking the Saône River that looked like a powerful six-story chunk of orange sculpture.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, designed by Moshe Safdie, opened in Bentonville, Ark., …

Danny Johnston/AP

Architect Frank Gehry’s Manhattan residential building, known as New York by Gehry (completed in …

In rural Vardø, Nor., above the Arctic Circle, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and American sculptor Louise Bourgeois collaborated on a shrine to the memory of persons burned for witchcraft in Vardø in the 17th century. Zumthor contributed a long delicate bridgelike wooden pavilion filled with a stretched-canvas object, and Bourgeois’s burning chair was situated in a smoked-glass cube nearby. Also in far northern Norway was the Knut Hamsun Centre in Hamarøy, by Holl, a museum honouring the life of the Nobel Prize-winning author, who died in 1952. Both Norway projects were seen as part of an international trend to assert national and local identity in an increasingly global world culture. In Israel the Tel Aviv Museum of Art opened an orthogonal addition by American architect Preston Scott Cohen. It was notable for an interior skylighted atrium, which the architect called Lightfall, five stories tall with many angles and curves. In Boston the British architecture firm Foster + Partners designed an addition to the city’s Museum of Fine Arts. It formed a major new wing and added 53 galleries. In New York the hugely popular public park known as the High Line, built on an abandoned elevated freight-rail line, was extended another 10 blocks to the north, with a third and final section to open in the future. The success of the High Line led to much redevelopment in its formerly industrial neighbourhood, most of it in the form of fashionable and expensive apartment buildings by well-known “name” architects.

At a ceremony in Vardø, Nor., to dedicate a shrine to the victims of 17th-century witch …

Scanpix Norway—Reuters/Landov

Exhibitions, Conferences, and Other News

Several exhibitions in 2011 presented some aspect of the style known as Postmodernism, which flourished in the 1970s and ’80s and in which there seemed to be renewed interest. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London mounted an exhibition entitled “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion,” and New York City’s National Academy offered “Parabolas to Post-Modern: Architecture from the Collection.” A two-day conference called “Reconsidering Postmodernism” took place in New York in November. Postmodernist architecture was a style that was critical of Modernism and often produced buildings that made reference to architecture of the past. At the Museum of the City of New York was “The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis,” which also argued against Modernism by suggesting that the classicism of the Colonial Revival style that gained popularity in the 1890s was the best style for Americans.

The Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Fla., showed “The Extraordinary Joseph Urban,” on the work of an architect often associated with the Art Deco style of the 1920s. In Montreal the Canadian Centre for Architecture presented “Palladio at Work,” an exhibit of drawings by the Italian Renaissance master Andrea Palladio. The Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) showed “Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century,” a collection of objects, photos, never-before-shown drawings, and rare film footage of one of the greatest American architects. Also at MAM and earlier at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City was a traveling show, “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City,” organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and the Palace Museum in Beijing. It was an exhibit of architectural elements and other materials from a private retreat built by a Chinese emperor in the 18th century.

Preservation Issues

The National Trust for Historic Preservation held its annual convention in Buffalo, N.Y., a so-called rust-belt city that still possessed a remarkable range of works from its heyday as a wealthy industrial centre. There were massive grain elevators, parks, and parkways by Frederick Law Olmsted and buildings by Wright, Louis Sullivan, H.H. Richardson, Stanford White, Eliel and Eero Saarinen, and other well-known architects. In New York City the American Folk Art Museum, an admired work completed in 2001 by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, was sold to its next-door neighbour, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). According to MoMA, the building would be used as expansion space for its own collections, but many observers predicted that it would be demolished. Another New York museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art by Modernist master Marcel Breuer, was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which planned to recycle it as gallery space. The Whitney planned to move its collection to a new building designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano and under construction on the High Line.

In New Orleans, neighbourhoods devastated by Hurricane Katrina (2005) were beginning to sport new houses, many of them sponsored by film actor Brad Pitt. The houses were often painted in bright Caribbean-inspired colours. All were raised at least one metre (3.3 ft) aboveground to guard against flooding. In Japan, regions of which were devastated in March by an earthquake and tsunami, architect Shigeru Ban responded by creating a system of inexpensive indoor partitions to give privacy to homeless families living in public shelters.

Issues in Architecture

In the U.S. and elsewhere, business remained slow for architectural firms. Increasingly they responded to their economic problems by merging with one another. They hoped that the result would be larger firms with a greater variety of marketable skills.

The death of Apple founder Steve Jobs stirred the architectural community. He was not an architect, but he had inspired architects and hired them. Notable were the nearly 350 Apple stores, many of them all glass, including the roof; most of the buildings were designed for Jobs by architect Peter Bohlin. At his death Jobs was planning a vast new headquarters in California by the British firm Foster + Partners.

In London work on the Olympic Park, for the Games of 2012, involved many notable architects. The most-talked-about building was Hadid’s London Aquatics Centre, a structure noted for its fluid lines. Most of the major Olympic buildings were planned so that they could be converted to public use after the Games were over. In Dresden, Ger., the Museum of Military History reopened after a 10-year reconstruction. Architect Daniel Libeskind created a five-story element that seemed to slice through the traditional building like a shard of shrapnel.

Following a dramatic redesign by American architect Daniel Libeskind that featured the inclusion of …

Jens Meyer/AP

In New York City work on the seemingly endless redevelopment of the World Trade Center site plodded on. Of all the new elements planned for the site, only the National September 11 Memorial, designed by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker, opened during 2011, 10 years after the attack. The memorial preserved the footprints of the former Twin Towers in the form of two deep square holes, down the sides of which water cascaded. The two voids were surrounded by a public park that was planted with a dense grove of white oaks.

Panels bearing the names of victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, surround …

Chip Somodevilla—Reuters/Landov

Controversy surrounded a proposed addition to the Glasgow (Scot.) School of Art. The original building, considered the most important work of Scots architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was finished in 1909. The school had proposed to expand into a new and entirely different building across the street by Holl, whose design for the building’s exterior consisted almost entirely of translucent or transparent glass, in contrast to the darker stonework of the older building. Influential critic and historian William Curtis considered Holl’s proposed building “far from being a worthy neighbour to a universally admired masterpiece.” Gehry aroused controversy with his proposed memorial to U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Intended to fill the length of a block near the Mall in Washington, D.C., the memorial design featured a row of 25-m (80-ft)-tall columns, with metal mesh tapestry stretched between them. At year’s end it was in the process of being revised to address criticisms that it was too big and grand.